Somehow in the hurry-scurry of the new year, I missed Kristin Dombek’s beautiful piece in last Sunday’s NYT, “Retrograde Beliefs, In defense of magical thinking.” Read it if you haven’t because Mercury takes it first 2015 trip backward starting next week. I know this because one of my A-priority New Year tasks is to block out on my calendar the four times a year it happens. I draw a thick yellow line through those 16 (give or take a couple of) weeks so I’ll know not to get frustrated, to finish incomplete projects and not start new ones. To neither sign contracts nor make big commitments.
Dombek nudged me with her graceful, faintly scientific reminder: Jousting with Mercury is a mortal stab at codifying mystery. Forget it. Alas, for us planners and plotters, Mercury is just the tip of the iceberg.
In 2008, on the brink of the Great Recession, I buried a St. Joseph statue in the front yard of a house I wanted to sell. I bought the statue under false pretenses, telling the cashier at the religious supply store that it was for my mother, who collected Nativity sets. That was true, but I had a distinct feeling I would be punished for fudging on the larger truth.
There were specific instructions for burying the saint. I researched the procedure and measured the distances carefully – so many steps to the east of the front door, so many steps from the street. Even so, when the house sold and it was time to dig St. Joseph up, I couldn’t find him.
This worried my mother, the collector, who’d put Mary and baby Jesus on the shelf beside her chair, awaiting the carpenter’s arrival.
“Where’s Joseph,” she asked.
“He’s on a business trip,” I answered. “He’ll be back.”
But he never returned, and Mary remained a single mother, much to my mother’s distress.
I’ve wondered about the unintended consequences. The house I sold is still occupied by the family that bought it, but I’ve moved every couple of years since then.
Then there’s the blog I started following a series of family deaths. It was an exercise in catharsis, and when it was over, I’d had I enough. I deleted my connection to the content, but I couldn’t delete the content itself. It’s out there, like a piece of floating debris or an orphan planet. Sometimes I want to reclaim it, but I can’t. The posts dangle in the ether, that great celestial dumpster.
There’s a scary freedom in this lack of control, like releasing a captive wild thing, and a reminder that I’ve never been, nor will I ever be in control. Which is the point. It is a mystery.
Chrysanthemum Marketing 